Buxtehude: Chamber Music (Complete), Vol. 2 - 7 Trio Sonatas, Op. 2
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Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707): Complete Chamber Music 2 Seven Trio Sonatas, Op. 2 In 1668, when Buxtehude was about thirty years of age (neither the date...
Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707): Complete Chamber Music 2
Seven Trio Sonatas, Op. 2
In 1668, when Buxtehude was about thirty years of age
(neither the date nor the place of his birth are known), he
was appointed to the coveted post of organist at St Mary's
Church in the free Hanseatic city of Lubeck on the Baltic
coast of Germany. Up to that time the whole of his
upbringing, education, and musical career had taken place
within the boundaries of the kingdom of Denmark. His
father had left the little town of Oldesloe in the duchy of
Holstein to serve as organist in Halsingborg, and from
there he moved at the beginning of the 1640s to
Helsingor; it was in those two cities on opposite sides of
the Oresund that the younger Buxtehude took his first
steps as a professional organist, ultimately being
appointed in 1660 by the German congregation of St
Mary's in Helsingor. His early musical horizons,
however, were not restricted to the immediate locality in
which he lived: only forty kilometres south of Helsingor
lay the Danish capital of Copenhagen, with its flourishing
musical environment both ecclesiastical and secular, and
Buxtehude must have been familiar with developments
there. In the 1660s the Danish royal chapel was under the
direction of Kaspar Forster the Younger, and the organists
of the six churches in the city attracted pupils from all
over Europe, including, for example, Johann Lorentz the
Younger, who probably taught Buxtehude, and gave
public recitals to large audiences in the church of St
Nicholas.
Buxtehude's new position in Lubeck far exceeded St
Mary's, Helsingor, in both prestige and remuneration.
Here he found a musical culture not far behind that of
Copenhagen; even courtly music was within his reach, for
not far away lay the palace of the Duke of Gottorp. St
Mary's, Lubeck, was the most important church in the
city by virtue of its status as the official place of worship
of the city council, and in the next forty years, until his
death in 1707, Buxtehude was to practice a range of
musical activities there that went far beyond his
obligations as organist and book-keeper (Werkmeister).
While the Kantor of the church bore the main
responsibility for the musical establishment, and in
particular for directing the choir, the organist had to play
at services and on important feasts and holidays, but there
was also a vigorous tradition of secular music, and the
municipal musicians, the so-called Ratsmusik, forged a
close link between ecclesiastical and municipal music.
The Ratsmusik in Buxtehude's time comprised seven
highly qualified musicians, retained, like the organist
himself, directly by the Senate. Their duties included
playing in church when instruments were required there,
as well as appearing at public and private functions at the
command of the Senate and citizenry. The string players
had particularly proud traditions going back to the
beginning of the century; the violin and gamba virtuosi of
Lubeck and Hamburg were famed throughout Europe.
Not far from Lubeck lay Hamburg, a major musical
centre with an opera house and a concert society
(collegium musicum) as well as its long-standing church
music traditions. Here lived a number of prominent
composers, organists, choir directors, and others
belonging to Buxtehude's circle of acquaintance, among
them contemporary celebrities like Johann Adam
Reincken, Johann Theile, Christoph Bernhard, and
Matthias Weckmann.
A great deal of the music of Buxtehude that has come
down to us, his cantatas, his big freely composed organ
works, and his music for instrumental ensemble, was in
fact not written as part of his duties as organist. Much of
his church music was probably the result of close and
fruitful cooperation with the kantors of St Mary's, with
whom he seems to have shared the task of producing
vocal music for the liturgy. Many works were also the
result of initiatives not in any way connected with his
church appointment. This applies in particular to the
famous Abendmusiken that had been established by his
predecessor Franz Tunder; Buxtehude expanded these to
five annual church concerts with performances of big
oratorio-like works, word of which spread over the whole
of Northern Europe.
When he was quite old Buxtehude published two
collections of instrumental chamber music. Apart from a
few occasional works, these are the only examples of his
art that were printed during his lifetime. Opus 1,
containing seven sonatas for violin and viola da gamba
with harpsichord continuo, is undated but probably
appeared in 1694. Opus 2, with seven more sonatas for the
same combination, followed two years later.
Though instrumental composition was not one of
Buxtehude's obligations as an organist, it was by no
means uncommon at that time for organists, as a
manifestation of artistic self-esteem and professional
pride, to exceed the limits of their ecclesiastical function
and publish music as free artists, without any particular
occasion or performance in mind. A few years earlier
Buxtehude's senior friend and colleague in Hamburg,
Johann Adam Reincken, had published a collection of
sonatas for two violins, viola da gamba, and continuo
under the title Hortus musicus, and instrumental chamber
music could be used both in and out of church. It is likely
that sonatas were played in St Mary's on major feast days
and during the distribution of Holy Communion. In the
secular musical environment of Lübeck there would, of
course, have been both professional and amateur
musicians who were interested in playing sonatas written
by the organist to the Senate.
Buxtehude was nearly sixty when he published his
sonatas, but he had been practising the genre for many
years. One of the few compositions that can be attributed
with reasonable certainty to his Helsingĝr period is a
fragmentarily preserved sonata, and in 1684 it was
announced that he would soon be publishing a collection
of sonatas for two and three violins, viola da gamba, and
continuo "suitable for performance both as Tafelmusik
and in church". This collection probably never came out,
but eight unpublished sonatas survive, some of which
may very well have been intended for it. Buxtehude
dedicated Opus 1 to his employers, the mayors and
senators of Lübeck, and Opus 2 to his special patron,
Johann Ritter. The dedication of the first volume refers to
it as the 'first part' of his sonatas, and there are other
indications that he regarded the two volumes as a unit:
they are written for the same instrumental combination,
each contains seven works, and they are organized
according to key in such a way that between them they
encompass all the major and minor keys of a seven-tone
diatonic scale beginning on F, omitting only F minor and
B flat minor. The key sequence of Opus 1 is F major, G
major, A minor, B flat major, C major, D minor, E minor,
and of Opus 2 B flat major, D major, G minor, C minor,
A major, E major, F major
The rediscovery of Buxtehude's music began more
than a century ago with his organ works. He was rightly
seen as an important source of inspiration for the young
J.S. Bach, not only in the period of a few months that the
latter spent studying with him in Lübeck. Later came the
discovery of more than a hundred cantatas by Buxtehude
in the famous collection of Gustaf Düben the Elder, the
seventeenth-century Swedish organist and court
composer who was one of Buxtehude's great admirers.
Buxtehude's instrumental chamber music has, however,
remained strangely neglected until recently. Apart from
unpublished sonatas, the Düben Collection, now in
Uppsala University Library, contains the only intact
copies of his two books of sonatas. The personal contact
between Buxtehude in Lübeck and the Düben family in
Sweden is just one among many lines of communication
that existed between musical centres in the Baltic of this
period, from Stockholm in the North to the Southern
coastal cities, from Reval by way of Riga, Konigsberg,
and Danzig to Stralsund, Lübeck, and Hamburg.
In the choice of instruments for his sonatas
Buxtehude avoided the use of the violone or cello as a
low-range melodic instrument, which was the
predominant usage in the Italian baroque sonata,
preferring to follow German tradition by using the gentler
sounding viola da gamba, a bass instrument that with its
range of three octaves can also play in the tenor and alto
registers. From the technical point of view his sonatas
must have been intended for some of the virtuoso
executants of Lübeck and Hamburg. Decades later the
composer and theorist Johann Mattheson gives us an
insight into this performance context (in his music lexicon
from 1740):
'In 1666 the world famous Johann Rist came to
Hamburg to enjoy the benefits of the city's musical
culture. An excellent concert was arranged for him at
the home of Christoph Bemhard; one of the works
performed was a sonata for two violins and viola da
gamba by Kaspar Forster the Younger, in which each
player was assigned eight measures where he could
improvise freely in accordance with the stylus
phantasticus.'
Sonata in B flat major, Op. 2, No. 1, BuxWV 259 (more info)
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Allegro - - 1:23
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Adagio - Allegro - - 2:23
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Grave - - 1:34
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Vivace - Lento - - 1:14
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Poco adagio - Presto - 1:59
Sonata in D major, Op. 2, No. 2, BuxWV 260 (more info)
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Adagio - Allegro - Largo - - 3:13
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Arietta, Parte I-X - - 3:40
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Largo - Vivace - 2:14
Sonata in G minor, Op. 2, No. 3, BuxWV 261 (more info)
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Vivace - Lento - - 3:04
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Allegro - Lento - - 1:25
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Andante - - 3:16
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Grave - Gigue - 3:09
Sonata in C minor, Op. 2, No. 4, BuxWV 262 (more info)
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Poco adagio - - 1:43
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Allegro - Lento - - 2:03
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3/4 - Vivace - 4:48
Sonata in A major, Op. 2, No. 5, BuxWV 263 (more info)
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Allegro - - 1:01
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Violino Solo - Concitato - - 3:19
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Adagio: Viola da gamba solo - - 1:21
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Allegro - Adagio - - 1:19
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6/4 - Poco presto - 2:19
Sonata in E major, Op. 2, No. 6, BuxWV 264 (more info)
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Grave - Vivace - - 3:19
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Adagio - Poco presto - Lento - - 3:39
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Allegro - 1:39
Sonata in F major, Op. 2, No. 7, BuxWV 265 (more info)
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Adagio - 4/4 - - 2:02
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Lento - Vivace - - 2:20
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Largo - Allegro - 2:51